"Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown,"
all belted and accoutred in the rags of their uniform, just as the death-shots had struck them down, and as they had fallen over each other in piles, lay the remains of Elphinstone's slaughtered army.
Close in ranks, as when living, in some places lay the ghastly relics of the dead. In one spot, where the last stand had been made by Her Majesty's 44th Regiment, more than two hundred skeletons lay in one horrid hecatomb; and in the shreds of red cloth that flapped in the wind, the buttons and badges, sad and agonizing were the efforts made by officers and men to recognise the remains of some dear and jovial friend, some true and gallant comrade in the times that were gone; and it was all the sadder to reflect that most of the fallen had been cut off in their prime, or even before it, as from eighteen to twenty-six years is the average age of our soldiers on service.
In too many, if not nearly all, instances the remains were headless, the skulls having been borne off as trophies by the various mountain tribes; and in some places the white bones lay amid purple, crimson, and golden beds of those sweetly scented violets which the Orientals so often use to flavour their finest sherbets.
For miles upon miles it was but a sad repetition of whitening bones, fragments of uniforms, and ammunition paper, bleached by the wind and rain and the snows of the past winter, together with the shrunken remains of camels, horses, and yaboos, from which the baggage and other trappings had long since been carried off; and ever and always in mid air the croaking and flapping of the ravening vultures, long unused to be disturbed by the living, in that valley of solitude and silence, death and desolation.
Like many others, with a swollen heart, set lips, and stern eyes, Waller reined in his horse, and would look round him from time to time, in places where the dead lay thicker than usual. Our now victorious army was marching in thousands over their fallen comrades, yet with them Waller felt himself alone, and a man possessed by one harassing thought.
His comrades were lying among those bones, through which the rank dog-grass was sprouting—the companions of many a pleasant hour, the sharers of many a past danger. The object of the loving, the gentle, the tender, and the peaceful in England far away lay there, abandoned skeletons, exposed to the elements, to whiten and decay like the fallen branches of the forest.
Orderly and quiet at all times, a deeper silence fell upon our advancing troops as they traversed this terrible scene, a silence broken only by the dropping fire maintained by our advanced guard with the enemy's rear, under Amen Oolah Khan, till the leading brigade of the first division on the road from Khoord Cabul to Tizeen began to ascend the shoulder of a vast green mountain, named the Huft Kothul, where the narrow and tortuous pathway reaches its greatest altitude, rising above even the white mists of the deep and dark green valleys.
Even there, a portion of the path is overlooked by the Castle of Buddeeabad, which has a frontage of nearly eighty feet, and walls so lofty that the mountaineers attributed its erection, of course, to the genii, under Jan Ben Jan, who ruled the world before Adam came. It belonged to the father-in-law of Ackbar Khan, a Ghilzie chief; and there had the unfortunate old General Elphinstone looked his last upon the setting sun.
Under the immediate directions of Ackbar and of Amen Oolah, the Afghans, particularly the Khyberees, in their yellow turbans, the Ghilzies and others, were in vast force, and they poured down such a storm of bullets from rock and bank, cleft and fissure, that the whole air seemed alive with the hissing sound, as they passed over and, too often fatally, through our ranks.